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10 ways to speed up Blender’s Cycles renderer

Changing the size of your render tiles can have a huge impact on the speed of Blender’s new Cycles engines, tests conducted by Blender Guru’s Andrew Price reveal.

Do you like the realism of the images generated by Blender’s new Cycles render engine – but hate the speed at which it calculates them? If so, the latest article by Blender Guru’s Andrew Price is for you.

Entitled ‘4 Easy Ways to Speed Up Cycles’, it delivers exactly what it promises. But scroll through the comments, and you’ll find at least six more, including several from Blender developer Thomas Dinges.

Some of them are obvious, but there are some useful rules of thumb for finding the maximum number of bounces and samples necessary for a scene; and an interesting comparative test of the effect of tile size on render time.